APPOINTMENTS: Supersalesman Arrives

Historians of the Nixon Administration
may well conclude that the President's economic shock programs of 1971
first took shape during a White House briefing on foreign trade last
April. It was conducted by a scholarly looking supersalesman, Peter
George Peterson, who three months earlier had resigned as chairman of
Chicago's Bell & Howell to become Nixon's adviser on foreign economic
affairs. Using slides and flip charts, Peterson forcefully drove home
to the President for the first time the seriousness of the nation's
slipping trade position and one of its causes, the decline in U.S.
productivity compared with that of its...